rescue mounting of existing systems with a wide variety of storage configurations

User Experience

No impact unless you have this hardware but current users of Intel ISW hardware and dmraid will find their device names changed.

Dependencies

mdadm 3.0 final (in rawhide now)

Contingency Plan

Fall back to using dmraid for imsm metadata, the dmraid code will be kept around for handling other metadata formats.

Documentation

FIXME: Will need to include in Installation Guide.

Release Notes

Fedora 12 now uses mdraid instead of dmraid for installation onto Intel BIOS-RAID sets, which should be detected automatically.
Devices with Intel ISW metadata will be recognized as mdraid NOT dmraid after this change, which will cause them to have different device node names.

This means that special precautions must be taken when upgrading systems with Intel BIOS-RAID sets, by default Fedora does not
refer to these device by their device node name, but uses UUID, so default installations can be upgraded without problems.

Before upgrading installations with local modifications to /etc/fstab or /etc/crypttab, or to other configurationfiles which refer to device node names, the affected files need to be manually edited to refer to the devices by UUID instead of by device node path,
see the output of the "blkid" command for the UUID's for your devices.

Note this feature is not enabled on livecd's, livecd's will still use dmraid for accessing Intel BIOS RAID sets, as will installations done from
livecd's.